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Minor-league ball team The Oakland Ballers set their sites on building a new stadium at Raimondi Park, an underutilized field owned by Oakland Parks and Recreation Department. The organization set Opening Day for June 1, 2024.
However, by the end of 2023, the Ballers hadn't started the process of approvals and permissions from the City of Oakland to allow construction to begin, and it had yet to secure permits to operate a professional ball team in Oakland. The Ballers turned to Lighthouse’s Oakland office chief, Shereda Nosakhare, knowing that only she, with her deep ties to and understanding of Oakland’s civic procedure and political landscape, had a chance of pushing the project through on time.
With less than six months before Opening Day, Lighthouse launched into action, advocating for the team and its plans to city leaders, department planners, city attorneys and administrators, real-estate department chiefs, and park commissioners. Concurrently, Shereda guided it through complicated code enforcement, public works, planning, and permitting processes to allow the stadium to be built and operated in Oakland.
Our expansive knowledge of Oakland allowed us to avoid many potentially fatal pitfalls that, arguably, no other firm would have been able to avoid. When before the Oakland Planning Commission for a final vote, commissioners discovered that city staff failed to include their report in commissioner’s packets. Without the report, the commission indicated it would need to postpone the vote to the next hearing. But Lighthouse knew The Ballers didn’t have another meeting if they were to open on time. With Shereda’s vast knowledge of procedure, she alerted the commission that, when copies of staff reports are not available, staff could read their reports into the record – a procedural detail even city staff and commissioners were unaware of. This allowed the vote to continue and Ballers to secure approval that night and avoid a critical delay that would have doomed Opening Day.
With Lighthouse’s tireless work, The Ballers stadium opened at Raimondi Park for its pilot season on time. Team executives say that, without Shereda and Lighthouse, the stadium wouldn’t have been built, their appreciation evidenced by Shereda being chosen to throw the first pitch at the newly completed Raimondi Stadium.
